Starting Stanislavski...

We have started a new unit based on the work of Constantan Stanislavski, and in pairs we are rehearsing a scene from a play – I am working with Anna and we are working on “A Kind of Alaska.” We have been focussing on emotion memory which was have incorporated into our scene by looking at moments that we can identify with and relating the actions and emotions shown onstage, to the real life event. For example my character Pauline speaks of opening birthday presents which is an easy and joyful memory for me to recount. We have looked at subtext which has been extremely helpful in trying to portray our characters truthfully. For example when my character is listening to Deborah tell me that I am not her sister, in my head I am ranting and raving, getting more and more fed up because she does not understand. We have spoken about the concept of before time which we hope to be able to convey in performance, as well as our ‘super objective’ and ‘unit objective’ for the scene.  This has been difficult to figure out as my character constantly changes moods and seemingly, unit objectives as she does all she can for her sister (who she ‘super objectively’ wishes, will get better and return to normal.)